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Review [published September 2005]
John Battelle: The Search
Chris Mitchell
John Battelle’s The Search is more than just a potted
history of Google, although that company looms large
throughout his book; rather, it’s a book which takes
stock of Google’s giddy rise, the search engine wars
between Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and the arrival of
online contextual advertising which has irrevocably
changed the nature of advertising itself. Battelle recognises
that the real story about the search engines is
actually outside the admittedly fascinating geek arms
race between the big players: what’s important is what
the very act of searching for information on the internet
means for business and consumer alike. The simple
act of keying in a phrase to a search engine is carried
out billions of times a day and in totality provides an
unprecedented map of human desires. The commercial
ramifications are obvious, but our culture and our access
to information are also being transformed by the nature
of search. Put it this way – once the net becomes a daily
part of your life, it’s hard to imagine doing without it.
It’s difficult not to sink into hyperbole when discussing
search engines, given the frankly insane stats
generated by Google’s meteoric rise (from zero to $1.3
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billion annual revenue in five years, biggest IPO in
Silicon Valley, shares at $300 a pop, trimester profits of
$300+ million, and so on). But Battelle points out in his
introduction that he didn’t want to write a straightforward
business biography of Google for the good reason
that business biographies don’t get read. There is a lot
of coverage in here about the rise and fall of different
search engines, to be sure, and Battelle has conducted
hundreds of interviews with every key player in the
industry to piece together an excellent overview of the
industry’s audacious growth. But Battelle is primarily
interested in the implications of what the massive leaps
in search engine indexing and intelligence mean for
the future. The Search, then, isn’t simply a business
book or a geek book, although it will be marketed as
such: it’s actually tackling one of the most profound but
almost invisible cultural influences on our daily lives:
how search engines organise and present information in
response to our queries. As more and more of our lives
moves to being managed through the net, the companies
who can correctly analyse what we are looking for
and give it to us in the most hassle free way are the
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